Freelance, Internships, and Job Placement

In addition, Chicago's vibrant design community offers the opportunity for professional practice in every configuration of studio, media, and project type. Museums, nonprofit organizations, galleries, arts and theater organizations, recognized professional design studios, a thriving business community, and a multicultural patchwork of small economies all feed creative production here.

Freelance projects are posted in the Visual Communication Design Resource Room and design internships are coordinated through the school Co-op office. Students are prepared for professional placement through the course VCD 3009 Professional Practice, a course that addresses portfolio development, résumé writing, interviewing strategies, and job hunting.

The school provides you access to many other resources, including:

The Art Institute of Chicago, an encyclopedic museum with a collection spanning 5,000 years of human expression across the globe and a new modern wing

The Flaxman Library with more than 100,000 arts and humanities volumes and 400 magazine subscriptions

Roger Brown Study Collection, an intimate collection of an astonishing range of objects including works by Chicago Imagists and other contemporary artists, self-taught artists, fold and tribal art, etc., housed in a historic house museum setting

Gene Siskel Film Center, which presents 1,500 independent, international, and classic screenings and 100 guest artist appearances per year

Fashion Resources Center, a collection of late 20th and 21st century designer garments and accessories representative of extreme innovation plus videos of runway presentations and vintage magazines from the 1890’s to present

The Renaissance Society, an independent, noncollecting museum located on the University of Chicago Campus that presents opportunities to investigate the most recent developments in contemporary art

The Newberry Library, an independent research library with an extensive, noncirculating collection of rare books, maps, music, manuscripts, and other printed material

Chicago’s architecture, a living laboratory for the study of late 19th- and 20th-century architecture, landscapes, and interiors—the development of the Chicago school of commercial architecture, the flowering of the Prairie style house, the progression of the City Beautiful movement in urban planning

For 150 years, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) has been a leader in educating the world’s most influential artists, designers, and scholars. Located in downtown Chicago with a fine arts graduate program consistently ranking among the top programs in the nation by U.S. News and World Report, SAIC provides an interdisciplinary approach to art and design as well as world-class resources, including the Art Institute of Chicago museum, on-campus galleries, and state-of-the-art facilities. SAIC’s undergraduate, graduate, and post-baccalaureate students have the freedom to take risks and create the bold ideas that transform Chicago and the world—as seen through notable alumni and faculty such as Michelle Grabner, David Sedaris, Elizabeth Murray, Richard Hunt, Georgia O’Keeffe, Cynthia Rowley, Nick Cave, Jeff Koons, and LeRoy Neiman.